Watch: 12-Minute Tribute To The Projection Booth Using Film Excerpts By Photographer Joseph O. Holmes

By
Charlie Schmidlin
|
The PlaylistDecember 18, 2013 at 1:00PM

Especially as projection booths worldwide are being ported over to humming boxes of digital data, it may hold some value to remember that there were once live people up there calling the shots. New York photographer Joseph O. Holmes has been tracking this shift closely, and in 2012 he finished a photo series on just that -- the city’s projectionists and their workplaces. Those snapshots are currently on view at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image, but Holmes also completed a short film tribute to the projection booth that you can check out now.

As projection booths worldwide are being ported over to humming boxes of digital data, it may hold some value to remember that there were once live people up there calling the shots. New York photographer Joseph O. Holmes has been tracking this shift closely, and in 2012 he finished a photo series on just that—the city’s projectionists and their workplaces. Those snapshots are currently on view at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image, but Holmes also completed a short film tribute to the projection booth that you can check out now.

As a companion piece to his exhibit entitled “The Booth”, Holmes edited together the 12-minute short, “Projection: 85 Years of The Projection Booth In Movies," using an array of existing cinematic examples spanning that time. These include snippets from “Cinema Paradiso," “The Blob," “Gremlins” and Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglorious Basterds”—all of which use the projection booth and the act of projection as something mysterious, surreal, and incredibly loving. It is a situation that Holmes found quite simpatico with his working methods.

“I love to discover and photograph private workspaces,” Holmes said in an interview with Aphelis. “I find a cluttered workspace fascinating, and one day I realized that projection booths are both very private and probably filled with fascinating clutter and tools and mementos.” You can read more of that talk over on that site, but first check out Holmes’ full short film below and tell us what you think. [via Movie City News]